An Anchor Lashes Out

Four days after CNN chief Jon Klein bluntly dismissed any and all questions about President Obama's birthplace--"this story is dead," he said--Lou Dobbs made clear that he would not be silenced. Openly criticizing his network and apparently contradicting his boss, the anchor last night repeated his skepticism in more ways than one.

Addressing the anti-birther argument that Hawaii has no hard copies of Obama's birth certificate because the state offices have gone digital and discarded their paper records, Dobbs said on his CNN show last night:

Yesterday a spokeswoman for the Hawaii Department of Health said, in fact, that paper birth records have been retained in addition to the department's electronic records. [...] my question is simply, why not provide the long form birth certificate and end all of the discussion?

On his radio show, also yesterday, Dobbs criticized his attackers, calling Geraldo Rivera, who said Dobbs was wrong about Obama's nationality, "severely intellectually challenged." Dobbs went on, "And tea-bagging queen Rachel Maddow over at MSNBC, she wanted another shot so she tried to twist my words, she ignored my statements in other words. She was not being intellectually honest, imagine that."

Maddow responded on her show last night with lengthy monologue railing against Dobbs and the birthers:

Mr. Dobbs continues to demand that the president produce his birth certificate, even though the president already has. Whether or not Mr. Dobbs will continue tracking in this conspiracy theory on CNN, or whether he`s been busted at CNN for it and can now only do it on his radio show, remains to be seen.

In the meantime, we`re all left to sort out the deeply confusing nature of what it means to be called a tea-bagging queen by Lou Dobbs. A tea-bagging queen? What kind of queen would that be, exactly? And can a female person beat that kind of queen?